Starfield

[Magic]

Jaysus. I don't even know if I can be arsed to go back to it, it was so fucking disappointing.

[Yevrah]

It was but depending on what floats your boat this could be the first step towards a huge improvement.

[Raoul Duke]

Are you going back in on the Survival Mode?

[Yevrah]

Yeah, I've whacked up all of the sliders to extreme (for a 75% XP gain) and we'll see how we go. I'm not sure I'll be able to manage the tutorial.

https://www.twitch.tv/chemicallocust

Plan is to add a few self imposed rules in as well, like get rid of the abundance of good shit the game gives you when you start and not buying anything from merchants. The latter might have to give if it really is that hard though. The options are the best implemented I've ever seen them do and by some distance.

[Raoul Duke]

What have you set for the graphics options?

[Yevrah]

30 and prioritise visuals seemed to be the best after a bit of a play on a save I had so I've gone with that.

[Yevrah]

Had a decent run at this last night. Kept the self imposed rules, which made what was already a challenge a lot lot harder. Some thoughts:

The combat is absolutely brutal, to the point I was nearly killed by a heatleech. I do no damage so can only really kill things when I get a good slug of my cutter into them, but I'm ok with that I think as it gives meaning to the combat perks which were basically pointless even on the hardest difficulty pre patch.

The gameplay options have been implemented in excellent fashion. I’ve never seen it before, but I appreciate I don’t play anywhere near as many games as some so Bethesda might have nicked the idea, but adjusting the amount of XP you earn depending on how hard or easy you make it is a masterstroke. Only slight disappointment is that I don’t know why they didn’t include one to turn fuel depletion on when grav jumping, but I guess that is coming.

So many more things have meaning. Sneaking into the Sol space station to pick up food and water with brutal enemies all around me gave an edge to what would have been an otherwise mundane trip. Only downside to this is it’s been implemented in quite a lazy fashion, in that every piece of food I eat sends me straight from malnourished to fed, be it a single orange or a full UC meal pack. The buffs and debuffs at either end of the scale are a very nice touch though.

I’ve a feeling bandages and aid items will be absolutely essential now as I’m either almost constantly wounded or sick from being shot at or picking up some filthy ailment from a planet’s atmosphere, so space is pretty deadly as it should be.

The maps are great, allowing you to pinpoint things you wouldn’t have otherwise known were there unless you stumbled upon them – unusual land masses, peaks and troughs. What is odd and bad though is that the ability to place a map marker seems to have been removed.

I haven’t played with it much yet (as restricting myself to Sol for now and having to run away from enemies is making it hard to find materials) but it looks as though internal ship decoration actually just works, in that you now have the tools to build a home on a ship.

It looks better than it ever has and I've not even pushed the graphical settings.

The elephant in the room is still very much there, in that the game simply doesn’t work with only 40-odd unique but repeating points of interest across 1,000+ planets, but putting that to one side for now it’s a very promising update that gives me some hope that they at least understand what is wrong with their game and are actively trying to fix it.